The Carter Center was founded by former U.S. President and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Jimmy Carter and his wife, former First Lady Rosalynn Carter.
The not-for-profit organization’s mission is to wage peace, fight disease and build hope.

Problem:

The CarterCenter.org site was almost completely invisible to Google, with only perhaps a dozen Web pages indexed, and a smattering of PDF documents. This is due primarily to the search engine-unfriendly URL structure. The use of Javascript-based pull-down lists as navigation within parts of the site, and reliance on Flash for navigation within parts of the site, also contributed.

In addition to their search engine visibility problems, The Carter Center was also looking for guidance on innovative online marketing strategies: ways they could get noticed online and generate interest in their organization.

Solution:

To solve the Carter Center’s search visibility problem, Netconcepts implemented URL rewriting on their server and recoded the URLs across the site to use the new, search engine-friendly URL structure.

With regard to online marketing, we came up with an idea for President Carter, and that was to start a blog*. Back in 2003 when we first suggested this idea, it was a really “out there” idea for the Carter Center to consider.

Blogging since then has become quite a bit more mainstream. During one of President Carter’s trips to West Africa he blogged for a total of eight days; not very long from a blogger’s viewpoint, but certainly long enough to generate a significant amount of buzz in the blogosphere and PR.

Results:

Within a month the Carter Center site shot up to over 2500 pages in Google — their entire library of content. This yielded significant traffic increases. As of yet, the pages are not optimized to “sing” to the search engines, but just getting them indexed has been a huge help to their traffic and visibllity.

As for the blogging, it has been hugely successful, as Connie Nelson in the Office of Public Information at The Carter Center attests:

“We are grateful to Stephan for planting the seed for one of the most successful Web projects The Carter Center has undertaken to-date.”

President Carter’s blogging stint — the first presidential blog — garnered him a significant number of links from other blogs and websites, as can be seen, by searching Google for carter “west africa” blog -site:cartercenter.org — yielding over 27,000 pages that mention President Carter’s blog!

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* What is a blog?
A blog is “a frequent, chronological publication of personal thoughts and web links” — a kind of hybrid diary/journal/guide site. And it’s a powerful marketing tool, when written by an authority on a particular subject.

Problem:

Although Steve Spangler has this great persona in the offline world, it wasn’t translating very well to the online world.

“Our ecommerce site was terrible. No, it was worse than that. The website was abysmal,” says Steve. “I was getting one million viewers a week on TV but I was ashamed to send people to our site. After a first re-design (by another company) there will still problems. They knew nothing about SEO or how to translate the Wow Factor into sales. They could make a site that was aesthetically pleasing but they didn’t know how to wrestle the credit cards out of people’s wallets.”

After researching the problem Steve discovered Netconcepts and began a dialogue that continues to this day.

Solution:

The engagement with Netconcepts began with a website audit. We evaluated their existing site and made a whole raft of recommendations on how to improve it or do it better, as far as usability, functionality, search engine visibility, and making the site stickier. All of this had the goal of changing the site so that people will want to return to it again and again.

Steve Spangler Science liked the audit so much they asked us to implement our recommendations through a site re-design which we did, vastly improving the functionality of their ecommerce shopping cart site, and getting every page into Google. The whole site was re-built from the ground up to be search engine optimal.

Steve comments: “Netconcepts taught us to do things differently, to think differently about our web content and to write differently. I realized I was searching for the wrong thing. I had to learn to see the invisible stuff behind the web pages that make them rank well in the search engines. I had to stop thinking like a cataloger and instead draw upon my TV skills from the Four O’Clock News, I had to grab someone’s attention and keep them from clicking off to another site and Netconcepts helped me realize this”.

We also wanted to convey how entertaining Steve was. We did that through installing fun product demonstration video clips on the site and then later through suggesting Steve start a blog. We helped Steve through the whole blogging process: evaluating blogging software, designing the look-and-feel, and training Steve on how to write for blogs.

“The blog came about when I came to Netconcepts with an idea for a site re-design and they replied with the blog concept. What’s more, their concept was going to cost one-third less and be more effective than my original idea. I thought this honest, collaborative approach was great and in retrospect the blog was the right next thing to do. It gave our site more punch. Now it will become the cornerstone of my new speaker website.”

Netconcepts also assisted with email marketing: email strategy, with template creation, delivery and tracking, ensuring the goals of increasing visibility and usability were adhered to at each step.

Results:

Steve Spangler’s ecommerce site has grown in the past 18 months with revenue increasing three figures to mid five-figures a month..

Steve’s blog, although relatively new as of this year has already achieved a PageRank score on a par with his ecommerce site.

“A detailed analysis of our print catalog marketing plan revealed a direct correlation between catalog distribution and increased web traffic. However, a survey of our top customers revealed that they turned to our website to get MORE information on a product that interested them. Our high-content website not only answered their questions but prompted them to buy additional products that “grabbed” their attention.”

“Together we worked to make a very successful arm of my business. I am a tough client and I don’t have a six-figure annual web budget. Why did I agree to publish information in this case study? Am I concerned about our competitors getting a hold of it? Sure. But I have trust in Netconcepts to protect our innovative ideas and creative marketing strategies. Anyone can hire a web design company to “open up shop” on the internet. But just because a store is open doesn’t mean that anyone is shopping or buying. Netconcepts taught us how to turn shoppers into buyers and the key is have creative ideas, to think differently and to be innovative. It’s easy for our competitors to imitate (and we see it every day), but the real secret to internet marketing is to innovate. That’s why our competitors will always be 8 month behind. Thanks Netconcepts.” - Steve Spangler

(Also be sure to check out Steve’s testimonial for Netconcepts)